The Sandretto Foundation in Venice. The photos
The artist Jota Mombança has beaten the project of the Turin foundation which will be fully operational in two years on the Venetian island. And that he chose the Biennale Arte for the launch of the bottle
It will be the gray of a day that announces rain, the humid cold of the lagoon in this bizarre April or the navigation of over half an hour that takes us away from the crowd of the Biennale to reach the outskirts of the lagoon, but the landing of about fifty colored and the chilled art workers on the small island of San Giacomo already have the flavor of a performance. The alienating effect is to set foot in this tiny land, which is only made up of ruins and shreds of Napoleonic fortifications to be on the rock that dominates the landing place, from the perfection of Patrizia Sandretto in a geometric black and white dress worthy of a frame from an Alain Resnais film.
THE CINEMA AND THE SANDRETTO THEATER
Young hostesses distribute shopping bags, a booklet and an apple. And in the little book he portrays a photo Jerzy Grotowski huddled against a wall while right there, in that patch of beaten earth, he was preparing for the 1975 Biennale one of the most evocative versions of his “Apocalypse cum figuris“. The staging had made him camp for over two months with his actors in the ruins of the island of San Giacomo and then revive in the waters of Venice that total work that merged the Bible and Eliot’s poems and kidnapped the spectators. even after the show to establish a direct confrontation with the exhausted cast, thus celebrating an idea of theater & art & life that was community, experience, expansion of our perception of reality. One more reason, or rather a viaticum is Grotowski’s ghost for the ‘island as the new and third headquarters of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation which in the vision of its chosen president will be: “Outpost of projects that travel between art, theater, cinema…. Center of exhibitions and residences of artists who in small groups can produce and create… laboratory… crossroads of experiences between ecology, nature, art… place of production of relationships and knowledge…. And this barren landscape of beaten earth will be restored, rebuilt, cultivated and totally transformed. After more than seventy years of neglect the buildings will be inhabited again, the cultivated fields, the piers frequented by boats and taxis “.
SANDRETTO, FROM 1999 TO PRESENT
“We chose Venice because it contains the reality of dreams more than any other city. It is a city that survives by transforming the past into the future, nostalgia into proposal, time into activity“Says, or rather repeats Patrizia Sandretto who had already expressed the same concepts in 1999 when the Foundation created”Dreams / Dreams”Surprising collective with a necessary of artists guided by the care of Francesco Bonami And Hans Ulrich Obrist. And here it is, still here Obrist baptizing the new FSRR house calling the radical and total as a witness to the whole project Jota Mombança artist who escapes any definition, fluid in his life, in his art, in his physicality. So let’s all sit within the walls of the old brick barracks to check with the first performance what the spirit of the place will be rediscovered and returned to the arts tomorrow. Mombaça defies the cold and damp wind sitting half naked in front of a microphone, where just covered with aquamarine ribbons, it gurgles, hisses, recites verses, responds to the electronic sounds modulated by the composer Anti Ribeiro that in stereo surround the four corners of the building building a symphony of words, songs and noises that increasingly resembles the sounds of the lagoon and the visualization of a slow, inexorable, determined, apocalyptic water that rises.
WATER AT THE SANDRETTO DI VENEZIA
How to recover the sense of the flood? How can you hear the voice and sounds hidden in the sea? Certainly not trying to translate them but surrendering to the physicality of the elements and letting the waters pass through them. It is only in this way that the voice can be transformed into a wave, undertow, sea, lagoon … This is what Mombaça reveals in an interview with Obrist, citing Grotowski’s radicalism, poetic syncretism by Édouard Glissant and taking for example Beverly Buchanan who, despite being a powerful land artist, wanted nature to take possession of her “Marsh Ruins” to the point of hiding them in a voluntary surrender (or collaboration) that questioned the anthropocentrism of the artist and his genius. If these are the starting points and if St. James is really a candidate to host such speeches and become the “Neverland” (or that no longer exists) of art understood as a fluid dialogue, courageous experience, reckless experiment, desire for transformation, collectivity, community, sharing, research, investigation … in short, all those things that then seem to belong only to Grotowski’s blurry photo, let’s get ready for the journey that doesn’t even last that long: about thirty minutes from the Giardini della Biennale (even if the other day it seemed to us to reach another planet).
– Alessandra Mammì
Art events in progress in Venice